Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver
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Yet despite this frenzy, the prevailing spirit was one of hopefulness, camaraderie—and fun. Head Start epitomized the continuation of the New Frontier under the Great Society banner. Presiding over this glorious chaos was Shriver. “A program as complex as Head Start requires great flexibility to be successful,” Julius Richmond said. “The person who made such flexibility possible was … Sargent Shriver. He helped us keep our eyes on the fundamental goal: a better life for poor young children and their families. Any decision was always measured in terms of whether it took us further down the road to achieve that goal. He helped us avoid rigid, bureaucratic constraints that might inhibit the development of the program.”
Even those who initially didn’t like Shriver came to be swayed by his invincible enthusiasm. “When I first came to OEO,” Jules Sugarman said, “I was not an admirer of Mr. Shriver. But as I worked with him over a period of time and watched him in operation, I became convinced that he was one of the real geniuses of America. I’ve never to this day seen anyone with the capacity to continually innovate, to continually push for development, that he has. And I’ve never seen anyone who was any better at analyzing the potentials and the problems and situations, not always knowing what the answers were, but at picking out the weak points in arguments.”
Shriver modulated the cultural tone at Head Start (and at the OEO generally) like a maestro. He would play people off against one another to the point where friendships appeared on the brink of rupture—but would then restore comity all around. (“I’ve never been in such stimulating staff meetings,” recalled William Phillips, who served for a time as the OEO’s assistant director for congressional relations. “No one ever went to sleep, because you were always guarding your flank against somebody else.”) “Ultimately, what Shriver’s strongest point was, was just demanding results,” says one early poverty planner. “He was tired of the bullshit.”
Head Start was enormously popular, but it was not immune to the political problems that beset the Community Action program more generally. Indeed, the single contract that would end up causing the OEO the most trouble over the course of Shriver’s tenure was made on May 18, 1965, with an organization calling itself the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), which was to operate Head Start centers for 6,000 children. The problems with the CDGM developed slowly, unfolding for several years before building to a crisis that threatened the OEO’s very existence. But as early as June 1965, the CDGM was a major political headache for Shriver.
The OEO originally made a $1.5 million grant to Mary Holmes Junior College, in West Point, Mississippi, for the purpose of starting a CAA in the region. Mary Holmes, in turn, subcontracted to the CDGM to operate the eighty-five Head Start preschool programs in twenty-four Mississippi counties. The CDGM grant looked at first to be an auspicious one: It was the largest Head Start grant yet made for the crucial first summer of that program’s operation. The poor children of Mississippi were precisely the kind of people that Head Start was aiming to reach.
But on June 3, 1965, Shriver received a telegram from Mississippi senator John Stennis, a conservative Democrat and an influential member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, expressing concern about the location of the CDGM’s headquarters. Mount Beulah, Mississippi, where the CDGM was based, was a hotbed of civil rights activism and the home base of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an all-black political organization. And the CDGM was run almost exclusively by African Americans. In this regard, the CDGM was an anomaly among Southern Head Start programs, many of which were all white or mostly white.
Stennis suspected that OEO monies granted to the CDGM for Head Start centers were being funneled into civil rights work. Not satisfied with OEO investigations into the matter, on June 29 Stennis announced that the Senate Appropriations Committee would be sending its own investigative team to Mississippi. Both the Senate team and the OEO team found all kinds of fiscal malfeasance and general mismanagement at the CDGM. So, on August 1 and 2, Shriver sent deputies to Mississippi to demand that the CDGM move its headquarters out of Mount Beulah. CDGM staffers refused to move, declaring they would sooner resign en masse.
Arrayed here in microcosm were the myriad political forces that threatened to destroy Community Action: Southern white politicians, carrying the banner of states’ rights, trying to resist racial integration being imposed on them by the federal government; civil rights activists trying inappropriately to use OEO programs as political tools; conflicts between OEO headquarters in Washington and the CAAs in the field; and conflicts among different factions within OEO headquarters. Head Start officials in Washington tended to side with the CDGM. To give in to the demands of someone like Stennis was to defeat Community Action’s entire purpose. Moreover, the Head Start staff argued, to withdraw the CDGM’s grant, or even to force it to relocate, would disrupt the functioning of the Head Start centers that had already been set up. This would be an affront to the families of the thousands of children already enrolled in these programs.
Battles raged at OEO headquarters. One faction was led by Bill Haddad, the fire-breathing idealist who ran the OEO’s Office of Inspection. (Shriver had brought Haddad over from a similar position at the Peace Corps.) Haddad was a strong believer in the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. Although he conceded that the CDGM’s finances needed to be cleaned up, Haddad (and his allies) felt that it was important to stand on principle and allow the local civil rights activists to have their way, at least to a point. Members of the OEO general counsel’s office, along with the OEO’s congressional liaison office, argued, in contrast, that the CDGM’s misuse of funds constituted a clear violation of the grant’s conditions and that the program should therefore be terminated. The CDGM had become “a tool of the black militants,” OEO general counsel Don Baker recalled. “Some of those [Head Start] centers were feeding SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] workers three meals a day out of food that was being purchased to feed Head Start kids.” Why risk the entire OEO appropriations package, which was controlled by John Stennis, over this one troublesome program?
By the middle of August, the CDGM and OEO headquarters seemed to have reached a compromise. The CDGM could remain for the time being at Mount Beulah but would have to move elsewhere within the year. On August 13 Shriver wrote to Stennis explaining that “the headquarters of the project will continue to operate out of [Mount Beulah] because it has been determined that any relocation, at this time, would have a damaging effect upon the program and it is just not feasible.” Stennis found this unacceptable and, after sending a second team of Senate investigators to Mount Beulah in October, declared that the site remained “a center of civil rights activities … and a hotbed of racial zealots.” Shriver responded that although he could not control what the thousands of Head Start employees did in their nonworking hours, he had “made clear that civil rights work—or political activity of any kind—would not be tolerated during working hours.” He also advised the Appropriations Committee that “rightful concern for frugal use of the taxpayers’ money … should not becloud our vision so completely that we lose sight of the fact that nearly 6,000 Mississippi children received preschool training, physical examinations and medical care, two warm meals a day, and a Head Start for the future.”
Because Head Start was such a popular program, Shriver’s plea fell on receptive ears in the Appropriations Committee. Stennis admonished the OEO to strictly supervise the CDGM’s administration and to ensure that more whites be included in the program. Basically, however, the CDGM was allowed to continue its operations as before. At the time, this seemed like a definitive victory for the OEO. As it would turn out, however, the battle had just been deferred to another day.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A Revolution in Poverty Law
The bad press swirling around Community Action made communities reluctant to open CAAs. But midway through the poverty program’s first fiscal year, Shriver found he still had money left to spen
d on Community Action. So he conceived the idea of what he called “National Emphasis programs,” service programs designed and funded by the OEO in Washington but administered through CAAs at the local level. Although the core concept of Community Action was that programs would be designed locally, Shriver thought he might be able to design some politically unthreatening programs at the national level and then provide federal funding to the local community leaders who would run the programs at the neighborhood level. The arrangement between the OEO and community leaders would resemble the relationship between a national restaurant company and the local owners of its franchise outlets: The basic rules and administration are established at national headquarters, but the individual restaurants can tailor the design and structure to the needs of the particular neighborhood. The first National Emphasis program was Head Start.
The other major National Emphasis program that Shriver began planning in 1965 was Legal Services for the Poor. That program, more than Head Start, embodied the basic ideological contradictions inherent in the Community Action model: Was the idea to provide services to the poor that would help lift them into the middle class? Or was the idea to use institutional reform to catalyze the political empowerment of the poor?
Before the 1960s, poor Americans seeking legal redress for their problems had little or no recourse for doing so. In fact, for the first hundred years of American history, there were no concrete means for low-income citizens to get legal assistance. The first legal aid organizations—privately funded charitable groups that would provide legal assistance to indigent people—weren’t formed until the 1870s and 1880s, and it wasn’t until 1923, when a Harvard Law School graduate named Reginald Heber Smith published a book called Justice and the Poor, that there was any serious talk of a national network of legal aid organizations. Under Smith’s direction the National Association of Legal Aid Organizations was founded—later to be renamed the National Legal Aid and Defender Association—and the number of local legal aid societies grew rapidly throughout the Depression. Even so, by the mid-1960s the amount of legal help available to the poor was far less than the need: By one reckoning, there was only the equivalent of 400 full-time lawyers for 50 million poor Americans, or one lawyer for every 120,000 people—as opposed to one lawyer for every 560 people for the rest of the population. Moreover, legal aid lawyers were reluctant to pursue institutional reform on behalf of the poor: Over the eighty-nine years that legal aid had existed in the United States prior to 1965, not one legal aid lawyer took a case that made it to the Supreme Court.
In most Western European democracies, the government was bound to provide lawyers to those who couldn’t pay for them. In the United States, every discussion of federally funded legal aid had run aground on the objections of the American Bar Association, which argued that if the government subsidized legal assistance for poor people, it would erode market rates for lawyers. Any attempt to provide free legal assistance was criticized as “the socialization of the legal profession.”
Shriver had initially declined to include a separate section on “legal justice” in the Economic Opportunity Act because he believed that Title II, the Community Action section, was broad enough to include a wide variety of approaches to fighting poverty, including the provision of free legal assistance. As the War on Poverty got off the ground, however, it became increasingly clear how strong the need was for some kind of federal legal assistance program. Legal aid societies were not numerous enough to contend with all the legal problems the poor experienced—harassment by landlords, cheating by private businesses, unconstitutional treatment by government agencies—and what few legal aid offices there were tended to be located in downtown business districts, not in rural areas or in urban ghettos where the poor lived.
In early 1961, while the Peace Corps task force had been struggling, Shriver’s vision for that program had been instantly crystallized by a paper—The Towering Task, by Warren Wiggins and Bill Josephson—that he had happened to read late one night at the Mayflower Hotel. In early 1964, while the War on Poverty task force struggled over various issues, a similar epiphany occurred: In April 1964 Shriver received a paper by a husband-and-wife team, Edgar and Jean Cahn, that was soon to be published in the Yale Law Journal. Shriver was powerfully struck by “The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective”: “It was like Columbus discovering America, an exciting thing for me to discover … something that captured my mind and imagination. That’s the genesis of Legal Services—it’s really pretty simple.”
In writing the article, the Cahns had drawn heavily on their experience working in the Ford Foundation’s “Gray Area” program in New Haven. In November 1962, they had been part of a group of community leaders and social scientists invited to meet with the Ford Foundation’s Paul Ylvisaker, to discuss his idea of experimenting with neighborhood centers as a means of reducing urban poverty. Ylvisaker had proposed that one service that might be offered would be legal assistance, and on January 2, 1963, Jean Cahn and another lawyer had opened an office in the building housing Community Progress, Inc., in New Haven, to “diagnose, refer, and coordinate” the legal problems of the poor. Cahn and her colleague worked on some civil cases, but their role became controversial after they undertook to defend a local black man accused of raping a white woman. When Cahn argued that the woman had willingly consented to sexual intercourse, white New Haven erupted in anger. The Ford Foundation was pressured into rescinding its funding; within weeks of opening, New Haven’s neighborhood law offices had closed down.
Jean Cahn took away from this experience not only a strong belief in the value of legal assistance for the poor but also the knowledge that for such assistance to be meaningful, it had to have a power base independent of funders within the local community. In “The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective,” the Cahns argued that Community Action agencies in liege to local political interests would be impotent to help the poor improve their social environment. Thus a “civilian perspective”—that is, a point of view that was not tied to existing welfare bureaucracies or local political machines but that, rather, served the interests of local residents directly—needed to be built into the OEO’s Community Action program.
Who could embody that “civilian perspective”? Lawyers, of course. Not only would lawyers be bound by the canons of the profession to serve the interests of their clients (in this case, the poor), but lawyers also would be empowered to use the American court system to seek redress from institutions, including the CAAs themselves, that failed to act in a just or constitutional manner toward the poor. Thus the Cahns recommended that federal funding for neighborhood law offices be written into the poverty bill.
The Cahns’ article struck a chord with Shriver, and after the original OEO legislation was passed in the late summer of 1964 he set up a special task force—led by the Cahns—to explore how lawyers might be able to contribute to the War on Poverty. Although the group reached a general consensus about basic principles—free legal assistance needed to be included among the array of services provided to the poor through the Community Action program—they disagreed about how a legal services program should be structured.
To what degree (if at all) should the OEO Legal Services program rely on existing legal aid societies and local bar associations? Some OEO staffers and Justice Department aides argued that in order for the Legal Services program to be an integral part of Community Action, and to be clearly identified with Shriver’s poverty program, there should be little or no effort made to involve either the American Bar Association (ABA) or the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA). These advocates saw the Legal Services program not as a “law” program per se but as another tool with which to generate changes in the social and institutional habitat of the poor. Gary Bellow, a public defender in Washington, DC, and Robert Kennedy’s aide Adam Walinsky pointed out that if the OEO involved the local bar associations, it would be “watering down the legal services organizations with conservative lawyers.” Wha
t Southern bar association, they asked, could ever be persuaded to take on a civil rights case?
But an opposing faction within the task force, led by the Cahns and Abe Chayes, a widely respected State Department lawyer, argued that the program would fail without the support of the local bar associations. Chayes observed that if bar associations were not enlisted, local lawyers and judges would feel as though their turf were being threatened and would consequently make life harder for OEO lawyers. Jean Cahn agreed; personal experience had taught her that CAAs would not always stand up for OEO lawyers when they took controversial cases. But, she argued, the bar associations would. Eventually, the Cahns’ argument prevailed: Enlisting the support of local bar associations would be an integral part of the OEO program.